Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

DEC 17-JAN 18

Tony Leuzzi

TONY LEUZZI's books include Radiant Losses and The Burning Door, both collections of poems, and Passwords Primeval, a book of interviews with twenty American poets. His next book, Meditation Archipelago, will be published by Tiger Bark Press in early 2018.

APR 2017 | Poetry

Tony Leuzzi’s books include Radiant Losses and The Burning Door, both collections of poems, and Passwords Primeval, a book of interviews with 20 American poets. His next book, Meditation Archipelago, will be published by Tiger Bark Press in early 2018.

SEPT 2017 | Books

In the James Kriegsmann, Jr. photograph that adorns the cover of Second Nature, Patricia Carlin’s new collection of poetry, a grafted orange tree laden with fruit rises from a square of dirt among cobblestones.

MAR 2016 | Books

Tony Leuzzi and Tod Marshall have never met, but their work has been in conversation since 2012, when Leuzzi finished Passwords Primeval,his book-length collection of interviews with contemporary poets. Marshall had worked on a similar project from 1991  2002; his book, Range of the Possible, explored the same genre: the meticulously researched literary interview.

MAR 2015 | Books

Theres nothing good about ill-timed death, Kathleen Ossip asserts in Oh, wow, mausoleums, the final poem in The Do-Over, the poets third book of poems. Nor about the death of love. That poetry glamorizes them disturbs me. Plainspoken and unsentimental, this passage typifies the tone and subject of Ossips newest collection, a bold procession of elegiac meditations and ode-like gestures that never hide behind gossamer veils of rhetoric to soften unforgiving truths.

DEC 15-JAN 16 | Books

Terese Svoboda is one of few contemporary American writers who possess a global consciousness. From 1987’s All Aberration to 2013’s Dogs are Not Cats, each of her six previous poetry collections captures what is claimed in the final sentence of “The Dead Dance” from Laughing Africa (1990).

MAR 2014 | Books

In 1936, the great Spanish poet Miguel Hernández wrote: I am tired of so much pure and minor art . . . I dont care for the puny voice that goes in ecstasy standing before a poplar, that fires off four little verses and believes that now everything has been done in poetry.

JUL-AUG 2014 | Books

I was born into a world that no longer exists, Mary Ruefle told me as we sat down to lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant in Rochester, NY. Although referring to how entrenched electronic devices are in our daily lives, and how terribly sad it is that more and more people have never known what it feels like to be off the grid for a day, let alone a week, she appeared to be talking about more than iPads and Bluetooths.

NOV 2013 | Books

Some poets seize and refine a particular aesthetic until their procedures can take them no further. Others are more searching and allow specific projects or concepts to determine changes in their approach from book to book.

NOV 2017 | Books

“That’s an awful lot of me,” Kevin Killian observed when I sent him proofs of the interview that follows this introduction—“Do we need it all?” On the surface, such candid self-effacement seems unlikely in a writer whose work is so searching and confident, but Killian’s apparent lack of ego may be connected to his fascination with makeshift art.

OCT 2016 | Books

May Day, the name of Gretchen Marquette’s debut collection of poetry, is richly ambiguous. On the basis of the title poem, and another called “Song for the Festival,” one might think the central metaphor of the book is a spring celebration commencing rebirth.

SEPT 2015 | Books

Distinguished for both supple, vigorous movements of language and a restless, sometimes searing honesty, Klein’s style is unmistakably his own. Whether a compact verse poem or a longer-scale scene from one of his memoirs, his work vibrates with an almost devastating energy that is a natural extension of his physical presence.

FEB 2014 | Books

In his redoubtable essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T. S. Eliot wrote, No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. I wonder how Eliot might have assessed the work of David Lehman, a poet whose recently published New and Selected Poems demonstrates time and again that ones ongoing engagement with poets dead or alive need not mask personality or stifle innovation.

NOV 2014 | Books

How could I feel / what wasnt there? James Tolan writes as doubting Thomas in his two-part poem, Carravaggios Thomas. This confrontation with palpable absence is a recurrent theme in Mass of the Forgotten, Tolans first book of poems.